Yana Aliyeva, a 34-year-old marketing specialist from Kyiv, first saw the face of her great grandfather Vasyl Horoshko in a Soviet-era criminal case file.
Now, since the State Security Service, known as SBU, has opened access to many of the files of the Soviet secret police NKVD and KGB, she has her own photograph of him, snapped by her phone camera.
The original picture, of a tired-looking, 50-year-old man with a traditional Ukrainian moustache and wearing a warm coat, was taken during an interrogation by the Soviet NKVD secret police back in 1929.
The same year, Horoshko, a resident of the town of Lokhvytsia in Poltava Oblast, was found guilty of anti-Soviet activity for having links to the Ukrainian Autocephalous Church, which claimed independence from the Moscow patriarchy.
He was sent to a prison camp in Kazakhstan for five years, but never returned.
Aliyeva was surprised to read in the criminal case file that her great grandfather had been a rich Cossack, the militarized social class from the Don region in Ukraine and the Kuban in Russia.
Another surprise for her was a collective letter signed by 346 residents of Lokhvytsia and sent to NKVD in defense of Horoshko and three other people arrested together with him, containing a plea to release them.
“We used to think those were only the times of betrayal and denunciations, but you see how many people stood in defense of them,” Aliyeva said.
It was a reading hall at the archive center of the SBU, Aliyeva spent many hours reading and photocopying the thick files of the almost century-old criminal case.
Under a law passed on May 21, 2015, Ukraine opened all of its KGB archives, except for those documents still containing state secrets, as a part of its de-communization campaign and ongoing efforts to reconcile itself with its Soviet past.
Thousands of people have started combing through the once top-secret files, with some 15 to 17 visiting the archive building in Kyiv, just across the road from the SBU’s own headquarters on Volodymyrska Street in Kyiv, every day.
Igor Kulyk of the Ukrainian Institute of National Remembrance, the state institution in charge of de-communization, said that some 50 percent of those who go to the archives are relatives of people who suffered under Soviet repression, while the rest are historians from all over the world.
Anyone, regardless of their nationality, can file a request with the SBU archive on its web page for information about a person or an event. In no more than a month, applicants should be able to view the criminal case, sent to the SBU reading hall in Kyiv or other big cities, or an answer with suggestions on where to look for information.
“Often a person doesn’t remember a father or grandfather, and wants to see his handwriting, his signature, his picture from prison,” Kulyk said. “It’s like touching a relative for the first time in perhaps 50 years.”
At the reading hall, Yevheniya Lebid, 32, was photographing the criminal case of Stanislav Bon, a 31-year-old military paramedic executed in 1937 in Dnipropetrovsk for his alleged membership of a Trotskyist organization, after many soldiers in his garrison had suffered from poisoning from compote.
Bon was a brother of Lebid’s grandmother, now a 99-year-old lady, who for decades believed he had disappeared during the Second World War and wanted to find any information about his fate.
Lebid said her grandma didn’t want to believe that her brother had been deemed an “enemy of the state.” Lebid was trying to explain to her the case was fabricated and one of the likely reasons of Bon’s persecution was his Polish origin.
“They simply eliminated the person,” Lebid said.
In 1960 Bon was rehabilitated after his wife requested a review of his case. In his criminal case, Lebid also found the address of her great uncle’s wife in Kryvy Rih. She hopes she can find a trace of her at last after many years.
“Maybe her children and grandchildren are alive somewhere there,” she said.
Tetiana Sylka, an insurance agent, 57, said she was very sorry that her mother and grandmother had died before she obtained access to the criminal case against her great grandfather Oleksiy Stepanenko.
To find out about his fate, Sylka filled in a form on the SBU archives’ website after seeing news about the opening of the archive on TV. It took her only a week to receive a response – and a thick file with a collection of criminal cases.
The family lived for decades in shame, as relatives of an enemy of the state, after Stepanenko was executed for allegedly nationalist and counterrevolutionary activity against the Soviet Union.
Stepanenko was the head of the village council of the village of Tarasivka in Poltava Oblast, when in September 1937 he was arrested along with 20 other villagers, accused of not putting enough effort into Soviet collective farming.
Searching over the testimonies, Sylka found that initially all of the accused denied any wrongdoing. But in just a month, almost all of them, including her relative, started to testify against themselves, most likely under duress. Soon after that, they were all executed.
“Some lieutenant called Bagrov was doing all the interrogations,” Sylka said. “I wonder how his descendants sleep now.”
In 1959 another secret police detective found that there was no evidence against any of the 21 people executed, and canceled the case.
Sylka remembers that her grandmother always said Stepanenko was a devoted communist, just as she was. The woman, however, couldn’t continue teaching in the village school after her father was arrested as an enemy of the state.
From the criminal case, Sylka knows that her great grandfather was executed in Kharkiv. Now she is determined to find his last resting place.
For her, it will be like closing an old wound.
“If a person disappears it’s like a wound for the family that bleeds for their entire lives,” she said.
